NZ Visual Diary - entry 251

strangely normal

I’m not much of a clothing shopper. Even the most cursory perusal of my clothes closet would confirm as much. Window shopping for me is more an exercise in social anthropology than it is fixating on the latest fashion trends. I examine display windows to gain insights into changes in cultural vocabularies.

Strangely Normal is a men’s clothing shop on O’Connell Street in Auckland’s city centre district. Its storefront caught my eye.

With reference to the noun normal in the shop’s name, the storefront’s visual anchor for normal is a set of male mannequin busts. They insinuate normal, albeit with a normative marker that speaks exclusively to a European-informed New Zealand. Fair enough, the reference is to a bygone New Zealand, perhaps the 1970s era of the store’s founding, when New Zealand was decidedly European in its demographic composition.

But the mismatched numerals [45] that mark the shop’s longevity indicate an awareness that time marches on. New Zealand has changed, demonstrably so, within the past 45 years. Or has it?

From the storefront’s presentation one would not know that New Zealand in 2024 is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world. Strangely Normal is nonetheless normal from a truncated field of view, one that sees eccentricity through an exclusively Pākehā [European] lens.

From an anthropological perspective, the store display in 2024 may be oddly abnormal.